ALL THE LIGHT - WE CAN SEE

New Jersey is the new Roswell – or so it might seem after a swarm of bright lights, glowing orange-red orbs and unidentified flying objects filled the skies throughout December 2024.

- SUE NELSON

As expected, these strange orbs gave rise to a flood of conspiracy theories involving UFOs and foreign interference. One US Republican congressman even claimed the lights were aircraft originating from an "Iranian mothership," a theory swiftly dismissed by the Pentagon.

Although the exact source of the objects remains unconfirmed, US officials suggest that the majority of sightings were most likely caused by – you guessed it – civilian-operated drones.

The New Jersey drone saga is yet another example of how many so-called UFOs have perfectly logical explanations. But not all phenomena are so easily dismissed. For decades, scientists have been baffled by a different kind of mysterious light: ball lightning.

While it's easy to roll your eyes at such stories, there have been eyewitness accounts of weird floating balls of light for centuries - the earliest thought to be in 1195. It's only thanks to the sheer volume of accounts and photographic evidence that scientists have felt the need to investigate these mysterious sightings further.

Many of the reports are from credible sources. For instance, in 1927, renowned quantum theory physicist Walther Gerlach claimed to have witnessed a "bright, luminous yellowish-white ball" emerge from a bolt of lightning. Being a scientist, he used his own hastily acquired observations to work out that the ball of light had travelled 1,225m per second (a little over 4,000ft per second) over three times the speed of sound.

Then there's Dr Roger Jennison, a radio astronomer at the UK's Jodrell Bank Observatory. In 1963, he was travelling on an overnight flight from New York to Washington during a thunderstorm, when a loud, bright electrical discharge suddenly enveloped the plane. Passengers then observed something extraordinary, which Jennison later outlined in a letter to the prestigious journal Nature.